There has been considerable interest in the use of ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) systems for both commercial and military applications. UWB may be used to refer to any radio technology having bandwidth exceeding the lesser of 500 MHz or 20% of the arithmetic center frequency, according to Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The use of large transmission bandwidth translates to many advantages over the conventional narrowband systems. To realize these advantages, however, the receiver may need to perform signal acquisition.
Signal acquisition may involve detecting timing delay. To perform signal acquisition, the receiver quantizes signal as a function of uncertainty range into several small ranges, referred to as bins or cells. Signal acquisition is completed when a receiver detects an in-phase bin, which is defined as a bin that corresponds to a timing delay or phase of a propagation path. In general, the receiver performs best if it completes the signal acquisition as fast as possible. A few prior art methods of signal acquisition employ accelerators, whose cost of processing is proportional to time used to test a particular bin or location.